Franck, Prokofiev: Stolen Voices

Stolen Voices

Transcription begins with an apparent paradox. The notes may remain almost intact, the piano may preserve its original part, and the identity of a work may still change at its most immediate level: the voice that carries it. The Duo Chiman approaches César Franck’s Sonata in A major and Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata in D major with exceptional fidelity to their texts. Violin and flute yield their lines to two members of the saxophone family, and familiar music acquires another way of breathing and projecting gesture. The title Stolen Voices describes this act with deliberate ambiguity. A voice passes from one body to another, revealing capacities that its first body could only imply.

The interval separating the sonatas contains a decisive chapter in the saxophone’s history. Adolphe Sax developed the instrument in the early 1840s and patented it in 1846 for military bands and the orchestra. A single reed excites a conical metal tube, joining woodwind articulation to a breadth often associated with brass. A saxophone class existed at the Paris Conservatoire from 1857 until 1870. It had disappeared when Franck completed his Sonata in 1886 and was restored under Marcel Mule in 1942, one year before Prokofiev wrote Op. 94. During that interval the instrument moved through bands, theatre, orchestral colour, popular entertainment and jazz, while performers established the technique of the modern classical saxophone.

The saxophone entered concert life without a chamber literature comparable to that of strings or older woodwinds. Transcription let players test its expressive range and enter into dialogue with the canon. It also exposes a basic property of instrumentation: pitch and rhythm can migrate precisely, while timbre carries the physical history of their production. The conical bore overblows at the octave; reed, mouthpiece and wide air column produce a rich harmonic spectrum. Breath pressure, oral cavity, tonguing and vibrato all shape the note. The instrument’s kinship with the human voice arises from this union of continuity and articulation.

The Duo Chiman preserves the architecture and piano writing, so the new medium declares itself through small details. A slur conceived beneath a bow must be redistributed within a column of air. A violin can sustain a line through changes of bow; a saxophonist must locate breaths without weakening harmonic direction. The flute begins sound without a reed and turns airiness into colour; the soprano saxophone gives the same pitch a more concentrated centre and a clearer edge at the attack. A phrase transferred intact may also cross points at which the saxophone changes resonance or resistance. Its contour remains familiar while its internal perspective shifts.

Franck wrote the Sonata in 1886 for the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, a circumstance requiring little further narration here. The opening Allegretto ben moderato grows from the piano’s suspended fragments and the soloist’s rocking phrase, whose rising and falling thirds become a generative memory for the entire work. On the violin, the line may seem to emerge from the extension of a bow. The alto saxophone replaces this with a current of breath and a warmer middle register. Its need to breathe can clarify Franck’s long sentences when each interruption is absorbed into the harmonic pulse.

The Allegro intensifies the exchange. The piano’s churning figuration creates an almost orchestral mass against which the violin could sharpen attacks or draw brilliance from the upper register. The alto has ample projection, though a dense fundamental and strong harmonic core place its line inside the piano resonance rather than above it. Balance becomes part of interpretation. Rapid articulation must retain the sweep of Franck’s argument, while emphatic accents leave room for the piano’s harmonic violence. Violinistic gesture is translated into its structural purpose and given an idiomatic breath.

The Recitativo, Fantasia brings the saxophone closest to the metaphor of a stolen voice. Franck loosens continuity into declamation, recollection and visionary expansion. The alto can move from a veiled onset to an urgent cry without abandoning the unity of its tone. Breath marks the recitative as speech; controlled vibrato colours the fantasia’s sustained peaks. In the Allegretto poco mosso, the melody unfolds as a canon between piano and soloist. The unchanged keyboard part lets the listener hear the same counterpoint through a new timbral contrast. Recalled themes retain their identity, while the saxophone makes cyclic form audible as memory transformed by another body.

Prokofiev’s Sonata, composed for flute and piano in 1943, stands at the programme’s opposite historical boundary. The saxophone had become an unmistakable colour in twentieth-century listening, and Prokofiev had used it memorably in Lieutenant Kijé and Romeo and Juliet. His own adaptation of Op. 94 for violin shows how readily the sonata could survive a change of medium. The Duo Chiman continues that history with a soprano saxophone whose compass and agility follow the flute closely while giving its line a different substance.

Prokofiev associated the Sonata with a bright, transparent and classical tone. The Moderato depends upon lucid proportions, long melody and unexpected harmonic turns. A flute can let the theme hover at the edge of the piano texture; the soprano draws a firmer line through it. Transparency requires control of vibrato and dynamic weight, especially high in the register, where the reed’s focus can make a climax arrive early. Wide leaps and register changes also demand continual adjustment if the melodic profile is to remain serene.

The Scherzo tests another fidelity. Its changes of direction, staccato writing and displacements depend upon lightness, yet every saxophone attack coordinates tongue, reed and air. Articulation must rebound, allowing the soprano to share the piano’s wit without thickening the texture. In the Andante, the reed lends sustained melody a speaking grain and finely graded crescendos, while finite breath reveals hidden cadences. Vibrato becomes syntax, distinguishing repose, intensification and release.

The Allegro con brio gathers these demands into exceptional mobility. Octave leaps, scales, accents and shifts between brilliance and lyricism were conceived for the flute’s agile response. On soprano saxophone they acquire more resistance and an incisive profile. Fingers, tongue and air must behave as one mechanism, and the piano must retain its percussive clarity even in the saxophone’s most radiant register. The classical outline remains exact, while its energy becomes more bodily and its lyricism more explicitly vocal.

The two saxophones create the album’s larger trajectory. The alto gives Franck’s chromatic inwardness warmth, gravity and continuity; the soprano answers Prokofiev’s diatonic brightness with concentration, agility and edge. In both works the unchanged piano acts as witness and interlocutor, preserving the harmonic world against which the new voices define themselves. Stolen Voices asks how much of a composition belongs to its first instrument and how much another can release. Every contour remains recognisable, while timbre alters weight, distance, syntax and memory. What has been stolen returns as a different possession, and the work is discovered again through the physical intelligence of another voice.